Artist Julian Charrière Invites You to Lose Yourself in Nature

Out of an impenetrable darkness, a single point of light floats into view. Others flit past slowly, whirling in every direction. A gentle flurry gathers momentum as the wind becomes more direct. Delivered into the midst of a blizzard, one squints into the onrushing snow. A glimpse of frozen ground offers a fleeting sense of orientation before receding into the night. In the distance, the gleaming white silhouette of an iceberg drifts into view, entirely deracinated from its surroundings. As a spotlight traces an icy ridge, a rising electronic hum fuels anticipation of a vista to be revealed, bringing into perspective a fragmented landscape disclosed in flashes of moving image. An exquisite glacial façade fills the enormous video projection screen, only to be enveloped, once again, in darkness.

On the night I first met the artist Julian Charrière in March 2017, we were standing on the deck of a ship on its way to Antarctica, staring out into the snow whirling in the darkness. As the ship lurched from side to side in the stormy seas of the Drake Passage, a huge spotlight panned back and forth across the black ocean. Although the ship was equipped with the most advanced radar available, a sailor was manually shining the spotlight, scanning for icebergs. Charrière remarked that it was like watching over the shoulder of a lighting operator in a 19th-century theater. All of a sudden, a colossal iceberg emerged from the darkness, suspended in a beam of light for just a second before receding into obscurity. One had the feeling of being lost in a dream. For Charrière, that moment became the inspiration for a major video work and corresponding series of sculptures, featuring glacial landscapes of the polar and high-altitude regions and the geophysical processes transforming them.

Charrière’s 2019 exhibition Towards No Earthly Pole stages an experience of disorientation that captures what it’s like to visit the polar regions. Narratives of polar exploration abound with descriptions of losing one’s sensory and cognitive grasp: snow blindness, malfunctioning compasses, and dangerously wrong intuitions. As Charrière and I experienced in Antarctica, under the rapidly dwindling polar twilight, such environs at once fatigue the senses and draw from them new feats of perception and modes of embodiment.

Several months after our fortuitous encounter at the Antarctic Biennale expedition, Charrière and I found ourselves atop Mount Tambora, a volcano in Indonesia that was at the center of a book that I was writing called A Year Without a Winter, published by Columbia University Press in 2019. After hours of climbing through an ethereal fog, we emerged at the summit to watch as the clouds rolled down over the enormous crater’s edge. This mountain, which at one time stood a third taller than it does today, plunged the earth into cold and darkness after its 1815 eruption. There, we learned that Tambora may be translated as ‘an invitation to disappear,’ after which another of Charrière’s major bodies of work—investigating the ecologies of global monocultures—is named. The multimedia project depicts an empty rave staged on a palm oil plantation, yielding seductive candy-colored images of extractive landscapes of the Anthropocene—and further philosophical provocations for me.

Charrière’s works sometimes operate as a geophysical postulate of a process that could have happened, or which might come to pass, at least according to a certain aesthetic logic of the material and sites in question. Or they sometimes move in the opposite direction, from a real-life experience to its distillation into an object or visual form. Most ambitious in this regard was Charrière’s presentation for the 2021 Prix Marcel Duchamp involving the fabrication of a diamond through the emerging technology of carbon sequestration—in this case, from air captured above Greenland combined with carbon extracted from human breath. By bringing into tangible form the atmospheric carbon cycle and the intangible sense of human interference upon it, the arbitrary value of the shining diamond allows us to reflect anew on the often-ambiguous consequences of human corruption of planetary processes.

For Parasol Unit, Charrière has installed four such erratics in the courtyard of the musical conservatory. His explanation or the choice of works for this site conjures a vision: Closing my eyes, I listen to the sounds coming from the open windows of the rehearsal studios, all of the different instruments mixing and flowing in rivulets through the courtyard. One can almost envision the sound moving like water beneath the stones, indeed beneath the foundations of the building and through the canals of the city. Here, Charrière explains, we encounter the compression of geological time, the melting of the glaciers that once topped the Dolomites, creating the flood basin and tributaries of the Venetian lagoon.